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Comment by tayo42 | Hacker News Reader

SRE has all these grand ideas like you need to know syscalls, debugging with strace, linux internals, designing major systems. Then you get on the job and find that your writing yaml and json all day and the interesting and impactful problems all get passed off to swe. Then you just get a check list because SWES making a quarter of a million dollars don't know how to log, add in metrics or use a DB apparently.

How to actually be an SRE, bullshit at a high level, work on a redhat cert, don't implement anything of value, bikeshed about issues with the people actually getting work done and pretend that writing yaml in git is "coding". What a demoralizing career.

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IME, it's much of the slog you mentioned, until things go sideways. Then suddenly, the few people in the org who actually understand the nitty-gritty are called upon to fix things. Rinse and repeat. That said, at my last place the SRE team did actually create some interesting and useful tooling.

> SWEs don't know how to use a DB

If by "use" you mean access it through an ORM, they do. If you mean "have an inkling about normalization, index design, and the query planner" then no, they absolutely do not.

Am working in Data Engineering and get the exactly same treatment:

Have to use some half-assed YAML based solution that compiled into Airflow DAGs. I'm basically a YAML "engineer" wondering what should I write in my resume: "I implemented hundreds of DAGs in YAML", while the other team bags all the credits and pat on back because they made a "great data platform".

BTW how does one get into a real SRE job? Or maybe I should just realize I'm not good enough for most of the "better" jobs out there, and should stick with whatever I have and hop once 4-5 years until retirement.

You are just describing a junior position (more or less).

Do you understand the business and can contribute to it? As SRE you can help save cost in production (harder to make money directly by building products or features). That's a way to a more senior position.

Can you automate the task you were given? can you use you new free time to identify where else you can save cost?

My conception of the position is that you can throw whatever data at me, but as long as you tell me the requirements I can get the data through with minimum cost and maximum accuracy.

I used to think knowing the business is important, but now I understand that it's impossible to know every business I'm in. I should rely on the BI for requirements and just do my job and do very well. I don't want to be a product manager or a manager so I prefer to stay in the technical side.

About the other questions, yes I automate as much as possible. I don't have any free time sadly as I'm just one man team (previously we have 6). I'm overwhelmed by this YAML engineering.

Anyway I'm starting interviewing soon.

TO add a bit, not every junior position work on YAML engineering.

This is the result of a poor org structure and poor leadership, not something particular to SRE.

You can take a look at any sre job description that gets posted. And I'm interviewing for these jobs right now. I talk to people constantly about what they do day to day.

As an SRE for 9 years: that’s nowhere near my experience. Depending on the period, the majority of my typing is either C++ or documentation. And the majority of impact is consulting on designing complex systems.

So youre a swe who does maintenence work...

Every sre job is going to quiz you on stuff like terraform knowledge, and then expect run their ci tools and manage aws.

When was the last time you changed jobs?

9 years ago. Got hired as a software engineer with a mission to engineer reliability into the systems. The definition of SRE.

That’s because you work at google. What tp described is sre experience at every other shop out there

This just means everyone else just got it wrong.

The market dictates what things mean, whether or not we agree with it. Is DevOps a position, a philosophy, a framework? According to the job market it can be any of things. In my experience interviewing for and working in SRE roles, most people are doing exactly what other people are saying in this discussion. A lot of SRE job descriptions are looking for people who do IaC to manage their cloud, handle CICD pipelines, and set up monitoring and alerting, all of which is ultimately a bunch of YAML (or JSON) with a bit of Terraform and Bash or Python.

Anyways, the point is it doesn't matter who is "right" or "wrong" and really we should be treating this role what it's being hired for, and as such education and training should reflect that.

Or that everyone else doesn’t have google’s unique technology and scale challenges that require anything beyond rebranded sysadmins. You decide

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